Small Business Marketing Strategy: Factor In Intuition
Intuition is an essential component of small business marketing strategy- but this really isn’t talked about enough.
While the much more popular topics of marketing trends, best practices, and customer research are incredibly important- they won’t give you the pathway to the best marketing strategy for your business if you aren’t also checking in with yourself about what you are actually willing to show up for.
Listen, regardless of what marketing channels you decide to focus on, all of them require consistent, quality content formatted and timed with best practices for the platform. If you pick a marketing channel you dread or despise, how are you going to show up enough to be effective? If you aren’t able to be honest about the time, budget, experience-level and affinity you have available for marketing- what’s to stop you from taking on too much?
When putting together your marketing strategy, you are a key factor. In fact, the whole thing will fall apart without your commitment!
Let’s break it down.
Marketing Channels = Big Commitments
As delightful as the “went viral overnight” stories are, they are hardly the norm. Actually, it usually takes months and months of effort before you start seeing a return on investment.
According to marketing thought leaders, here is roughly how long it takes for some common types of marketing to work:
Content Marketing: 6-9 months
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): 6-12 months
Google Adwords: 6-12 months
Social Media Marketing: 6 months
And folks, that’s months of consistently showing up on your channels of choice with quality content. It’s months of experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s months of learning about best practices for the channel and keeping up with updates and changing trends. It’s months of getting to know your customers and how to better serve them with your content.
So, when you’re deciding whether you’re going to be marketing your business on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google Ads, via a website, with a newsletter, etc., you’re actually deciding on where you are going to make a significant investment in terms of time, effort, and- in all likelihood- money.
In other words, the marketing channels you choose to focus on are big commitments. You’re gonna need to be in it for the long haul, through the ups and downs. So, just like you wouldn’t marry someone without checking in with your intuition to see if that’s who you really wanted to commit to, you shouldn’t take on marketing channels you feel iffy about.
Consistency Is Key
To really paint this picture, let’s talk about how much time and effort you’re going to need to put into your marketing channels of choice once you’ve committed to them.
Let’s say you’ve decided you want to market over Instagram. According to the social media scheduling platform Later’s analysis of millions of feed posts, accounts with less than a thousand followers should be posting 14 times a week to maximize reach and engagement. That averages out to twice a day every day. And that’s a lot, folks. Even if you pre-batch and repost.
As for blogging, HubSpot recommends small blogs publish 1-2 new blog posts a week if they’re trying to build brand awareness and 3-4 new blog posts a week if they’re trying to increase organic web traffic.
That’s also a lot. For us, it takes roughly 6 hours to produce, edit, polish, and publish a quality blog post optimized for search engines. (And that’s not even counting the time to promote it.) If we followed HubSpot’s recommendations, that would be 6-24 hours of blogging every week.
So, what does this have to do with intuition? Well, if you despise writing and are responsible for marketing your business, it’s unlikely you’ll carve out 6-24 hours a week for writing. So, blogging probably isn’t the right marketing channel for your business. Likewise, if the thought of going on Instagram multiple times a day makes you ill, well, you probably shouldn’t hinge your marketing strategy on Instagram.
You won’t show up with the consistency required for marketing success if you pick a marketing channel you despise. And your marketing won’t be effective unless you’re willing to go all in on the channels you select to build brand awareness and bring in new customers.
So, if you’re a small business with limited resources for marketing, you’re going to have to be really selective about how and where you do your marketing. Your intuition is going to give you some powerful indications for whether it’s a channel you’re actually willing to go all in for or not.
Do You Have Time To Show Up On Everything?
Maybe you’re an entrepreneur positively overflowing with creativity and you can’t wait to livestream, blog, host webinars, send out the most visually interesting newsletter, hold it down on 4-5 social media platforms, etc., and learn the whole SEO thing. Yes! Awesome, love the enthusiasm.
But, if you’re a small team or a team of one, you simply can’t do all of this in a way that would be effective. Especially if you are a 1-person show, or are new to marketing, new to the platforms, or your business is new, having a presence on all these channels is not going to work out. How are you going to learn best practices for everything, keep up with trends, experiment, analyze data, post consistently enough, etc. etc.?
You can’t. It’s not possible. You’ll drive yourself crazy and get discouraged by doing so much of everything but not enough of any of it to generate a strong return on investment.
So. You’re going to need to have a serious talk with yourself. What do you actually have time for? What do you actually want to spend the hours and hours that marketing requires doing?
Sure, you can try out and experiment with other platforms and mediums. But you do need to narrow your priorities down to a few marketing channels so you can put in the consistency and quality needed for your marketing to succeed.
The Gift of Marketing Strategy
This is why having a marketing strategy is really important. It’s going to prevent that scattered, overloaded, overwhelmed feeling that can really throw a monkey-wrench in your entrepreneurial journey.
A marketing strategy clarifies your brand identity, goals, resources available, channels, and plan of action. It sets priorities for what to tackle first, second, third, etc. and what will count as success vs. indicate the need for a pivot. It will show you what you can let go of and not worry about right now.
Almost all entrepreneurs and small businesses initially try to take on too many marketing activities at once. You can save yourself a lot of heartache by getting your small business marketing strategy together so you know where to put the marketing effort in- and where not to.
If the thought of such a clear, attainable focus and direction just gave you a good exhale and dropped your shoulders- let’s get you a marketing strategy. We can put together a custom marketing strategy for your business or you can come to the Marketing Strategy For Small Business Virtual Workshop on Oct. 26 so you can DIY your own.
